Lorde has announced that her new album will be titled Virgin.
The alternative pop artist’s fourth record, which features the recent single “What Was That,” is set to be released on June 27.
The 28-year-old has historically dropped new records in four-year intervals; she released her debut album, Pure Heroine, in 2013, Melodrama in 2017, and the critically divisive Solar Power in 2021.
Anticipation is sky-high for new music from the singer, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor. Last week, her appearance at a park in New York Tuesday had to be postponed at the last minute after police told thousands of fans to disperse.
Lorde later appeared at the park unannounced to play her latest single. “What Was That” was released last Friday, April 25.
On April 11, Lorde sent her fans into meltdown by sharing a snippet of the song on social media.
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The song, in the singer’s favored synth-pop style, features the lyrics: “Since I was 17/ I gave you everything/ Now we wake from a dream/ Well baby, what was that?”
At the time, fans rushed to the TikTok comment section to celebrate Lorde’s return. “SHE HAS RISEN AND IT’S NOT EVEN EASTER,” one person wrote. “SECOND COMING OF CHRIST,” added another.
Meanwhile another person claimed: “Brat summer walked so Lorde summer could run,” in reference to Charli XCX’s latest album, on which Lorde featured.
In a four-star review of “What Was That” for The Independent, music critic Mark Beaumont wrote of the song’s lyrics: “‘MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up,’ she recalls, lacing producer Dev Hynes’ elegant rave beats with the breathy resilience of her trademark introspective dream pop, ‘We kissed for hours straight … I want you just like that’.
“And as she wanders New York a lonely dimension removed from reality – covering her mirrors, staring through her friends and wearing ‘smoke like a wedding veil’, a shadow presence pining for the past – she seems to embody exactly that rekindled flame.”
Beaumont continued: “There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the track itself. If anything it’s an inch or two behind the times, relying heavily on the kind of snarly slogan hookline that Charli XCX owns now, the increasingly tired ‘shock value’ of mentioning drugs or sex in pop songs, and a high-reverb vocal twist that will recall, for listeners old enough to remember Gossip Girl, ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ by Foster the People, or MGMT.
“But as a mode of reconnection, it gives Lorde’s subjects everything they want – vulnerability, confessional insight and further means to dance away the heartache. She rises again, to push pretenders from their stools.”
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